


colder in the summertime

by yeeharley



Series: golden dandelions [2]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: (this is the enemies to friends bit), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Bisexual Peter Parker, Bullying, Child Abuse, Coming Out, Enemies to Friends, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gay Harley Keener, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Multi, Past Character Death, Religious Guilt, Sexuality Crisis, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, Smoking, Street fighting, They'll get better, Underage Smoking, and i'll put a cw at the beginning of each chapter if any apply, because peachy said i could, but it's all part of the Development okay, understand that there's gonna be some questionable actions done by some characters in this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29062887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeeharley/pseuds/yeeharley
Summary: cw: underage smoking, implied/referenced past (and present) child abuse, implied/referenced bullyingI know there's not a lot of Peter content/POV in this chapter but!! there will be next chapter, there's some stuff that needed to Not Be Known quite yet so if you're here for him trust me you'll be getting himangry? happy? a mix of the two? yell at me over at my tumblr,yeeharley
Relationships: Harley Keener & Harley Keener's Mother, Harley Keener & Harley Keener's Sister, Harley Keener & Original Female Characters, Harley Keener & Original Male Characters, Harley Keener's Mother/Harley Keener's Father, Peter Parker & Harley Keener, Peter Parker & May Parker, Peter Parker/Harley Keener
Series: golden dandelions [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2129109
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	colder in the summertime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: underage smoking, implied/referenced past (and present) child abuse, implied/referenced bullying
> 
> I know there's not a lot of Peter content/POV in this chapter but!! there will be next chapter, there's some stuff that needed to Not Be Known quite yet so if you're here for him trust me you'll be getting him
> 
> angry? happy? a mix of the two? yell at me over at my tumblr, [yeeharley](https://yeeharley.tumblr.com/)

The fabric of Harley's jersey is hot against his back, soaked through with a mixture of sweat and dew from the freshly-mowed grass of the football field. He's pretty sure the little holes in the mesh are supposed to make it more breathable- can't really think of any other reason for them to be there- but they don't seem to be doing their job, because it's so _fucking_ hot that his chest feels like a kiln. Every breath he takes is just hot, dry air that burns his throat, and he wants to stop and sit down because _God,_ this _hurts._

But he can't quit.

People are watching. People are _always_ watching him; they stare from beside their lockers, from the bleachers in the gym, from the stands lining the field, from the back of the classroom. He can feel their eyes boring into the back of his neck like hot pokers.

That kind of constant surveillance is enough to make anybody squirm. Harley feels like a bug beneath a microscope, constantly inspected, always studied, trapped beneath the expectations of people who hardly know him and definitely don't care.

The studs on the bottoms of his cleats grip the turf as he pulls another tight turn and sprints back to the painted white line, tapping it lightly with his finger before turning again and making for the opposite side of the field. He's been running suicides for the past ten minutes with a few other players on his team; only a few of them have dropped, and he can hear them breathing heavily as their feet pound against the ground. To his left, Clay Brennan starts to lag behind, jogging a few feet behind Harley. To his right, E.J. Jackson keeps his pace to the inch, leaning into each step with the grace of an Olympic runner.

Coach Brower blows his whistle as soon as Harley's left foot hits the line. It's loud and shrill, and other than the sound of heavy breathing and quiet murmurs from the stands, it breaks the silence of the football field under the light of the six-o'clock sun. 

The sun is just starting to creep over the horizon, spilling honeyed rays of gold and yellow over the line of trees to the east of Rose Hill High's main building. Harley shields his eyes against its brightness, squinting, and tries to breathe through the burning in his chest. His heart feels like it's going to break right out of his ribcage. 

"Shi- _et,_ " Clay pants, bracing his hands against his knees. He's got a serious case of helmet hair- all messy and strewn across his forehead, covering up the multitude of zits on his hairline.

Harley rolls his eyes. Pulls his own helmet off, running his hand through his hair so that it falls into his eyes in golden waves. It's practically soaked with sweat. He hears the whispers in the stands grow louder, picks out a few giggles from the clusters of girls who always come to watch him practice. 

He's going to have to shower before class. There's no way he's sitting through eight hours of school like this.

Brower does his usual spiel from the sidelines, clipboard tucked under his arm- _Some of you needa get your shit together, I want everyone's mile down to three minutes; Johnson, I'll have you offa the team if you don't start putting some damn effort into your practice-_ and on, and on, and on. Harley's only half-listening, and he knows that E.J. probably isn't paying any attention at all.

They're Rose Hill's strongest athletes. None of these comments are for them, and they know it.

Everyone does.

E.J. sidles up beside him, bumping his forearm against Harley's elbow. He leans in so that his lips are parallel to Harley's ear, practically touching. Harley angles himself toward the other boy- he has to look down a bit to meet his eyes, even though E.J. is only an inch or two shorter than him (most people are, really- he's unfairly tall, even more so than Johnathan had been).

"Nice job today," E.J. murmurs, crossing his arms across his chest as Brower screams at one of the freshmen for fumbling a perfect pass. "You're fast."

Harley rolls his eyes again, but this time, it comes with a smirk. Clay gets on his nerves. E.J. could never.

"You already knew that," he whispers back, "because I fuckin' beat you last Monday in that race."

"You cheated an' you _know_ it, Keener."

"Do I?"

A drop of sweat trails down Harley's neck. He reaches up, wipes it away, and returns his hand to his hip, glowering down at E.J.

He nods, brushing his dark hair out of his eyes. E.J. looks like Clark Kent- unfairly so, because Harley wishes _he_ looked like that, with that fluffy brown hair and those big eyes. "The path was all muddy an' you know I wasn't wearin' my cleats."

"You only fell because you walk like a fuckin' bear."

Harley knows that's not true; E.J. is pretty much the most agile player on their team. He can pull hairpin turns without falling, can weave between enemy linebackers without breaking a sweat. He'd fallen because of the leftover rain from the night before, and the only reason Harley hadn't _had been_ because he was wearing metal-studded cleats.

"Shoulda worn your cleats," he says wisely, stepping back toward the building as Brower finishes up his speech. E.J. falls into line beside him, pulling his jersey off to reveal his soaked undershirt. None of them are wearing any gear other than their helmets; head injuries are a _bitch_ and Harley's had enough concussions to last him a lifetime. He lifts his own jersey off, left only in a black tank top, and snickers as one of the girls in the stands gasps.

It doesn't make him uncomfortable. Not at all. Why the hell would being ogled by people he doesn't know make him uncomfortable?

E.J. elbows him in the side. Wiggles his eyebrows. Harley, refusing to look back at the girl, slugs him in the arm and speeds up to a jog, rushing into the building with E.J. on his heels. He has thirty minutes to get a shower, change, and find his scattered schoolbooks (he can't seem to keep up with anything) before classes start, and if he's late for a third time, he'll end up with detention.

He can't get a detention. Can't have another mark on his record.

Macy's too busy taking care of her bakery and Abby to deal with a delinquent son. Harley knows she can't take much more.

E.J. breaks off when they get to the locker room, slipping into one of the shower stalls and closing the curtain behind himself. The sound of running water echoes off of the tile walls as Harley opens his locker and pulls out a wad of neatly-folded clothes, stowing his helmet next to his backpack where nobody'll be able to get to it (he'd had someone write some very interesting things on it in tenth grade and it had taken an entire bottle of nail polish remover to get the sharpie off).

The water is cold against his burning skin, and he relishes in the way it runs through his hair and over his shoulders. Harley's heart is still pounding from ten minutes of sprinting back and forth in ninety-degree weather- not that it's too hot; in August, the temperature had peaked at a hundred and two. For October, sure, it's pretty hot, but nothing he can't handle. 

His fingers catch in the knots in his hair as he tries to comb them out, tangled from being pressed up against his skull. He dries off with the towel he always keeps at school, ruffling it up around his head so that his hair won't drip onto his shirt, and pulls on his clothes. Only almost falls once (he catches himself against the wall, so it doesn't really matter that much anyways). 

These stalls are much too slippery to be safe. Then again, Harley's expected to have better balance than this, so the blame is probably equal.

E.J. is already gone when he steps out, fully dressed in his favorite Levis and red flannel. There's nobody else in the room; everybody else is probably on their way to class, and the rest of the football team had been held back a bit so they could be 'motivated'. He doesn't think yelling is a terribly good motivator, if he's being honest, but it's not really his place to say.

It never worked for him. Just made him angrier. And of course, that got him yelled at more, so it was more of a vicious cycle than a motivator.

Harley sits down on the bench to lace up his workboots, tucking his cracked phone into his pocket. His backpack is loaded up with books, binders, loose papers, and the like- he'll probably clean it out this weekend so that he can actually find things, which would be useful. 

When he slips out of the locker room, bag slung over his right shoulder, the hall is already crowded with students on their way to their classes. Colorful skirts and different shades of denim mingle together, packed close like a school of fish. 

If Harley's classmates are the fish, the lockers- all covered in stickers and marker and all matter of paraphernalia- must be the reef, and the oxygen must be the ocean.

And the sharks?

 _Sometimes,_ Harley knows, _sharks hunt in packs-_ _lemon sharks, blacktips, sevengills. But, more often than not, they're solitary, and solitary sharks are much more likely to attack people than their more social counterparts._

Back in his shark phase- fourth and fifth grade- he had ingested an insane amount of books about hunting methods and prey and habitats, because that had just been the type of kid Harley had been. He'd been found in his room at three in the morning, reading under the covers, marveling down at pictures of dark eyes and sharp teeth.

He remembers reading about a specific method of hunting- _bumping,_ he thinks it had been called- where the shark about to attack would bump up against its prey and circle to try and figure out how big, how dangerous, how likely to attack it was.

The sharks of Rose Hill do that, too. They size up their victims, standing off to the side where they won't be noticed until they want to be. Brush up against them just enough to get them angry, to figure out how much it'll take for them to be pushed over the edge, to see how much they can get away with.

Most of the time, you don't see sharks until they're too close for you to escape.

Most of the time, they're good enough at staying hidden in the shadows, at being unseen.

Most of the time, people aren't _looking_ for them.

But Harley is.

Harley _always_ is.

And, sometimes, he finds them where he doesn't expect to.

\- ☁ -

The skin between Peter's right pinky and ring finger is split, cracked like the dried mud caked onto the soles of his shoes from the last rain. It's stinging, bleeding, spilling red down the front of his hand nearly to his wrist. Hurts nearly as bad as a paper cut- which is to say, not nearly enough to warrant any type of medical attention.

He probably should've wrapped his hands before bringing hellfire down on that poor punching bag.

Then again, Peter rarely does what he should.

His left hand is probably bleeding, too, but he doesn't bother to check for himself; it'll heal quickly enough, and in the end, his skin will be tougher for it. Absently, Peter sticks the tip of his fist in his mouth, wincing at the sharp, metallic taste of blood on his tongue, and braces his foot against the still-swinging back to stop its movement.

He'd hit it a bit harder than usual.

It was probably used to it at this point, though.

After a few minutes of balancing on the balls of his feet, the bag stops moving. Peter steps away, fist still in his mouth, pulling his shirt away from his sticky skin so it doesn't dry there before he can change.

It's not like he can go to school like this.

_He could skip. He shouldn't, can't disappoint May again, but he could._

_He kinda wants to._

"Spanish test," he murmurs aloud into the silence of Rose Hill's only martial arts studio- well, silent except for the rattling of the air-con vents, probably full of dust and debris. Peter'll clean those out this weekend when he gets a break. Lord knows Delmar could use help with the upkeep.

With a loud, belabored sigh, Peter grabs his gym bag from the bench and quickly changes his shirt from his best black tank top to one of Ben's old tees, shaking his wet hair out of his eyes. He's not in the mood to change all the way- and anyways, sweatpants are fine school attire. He's well within the dress code bounds. Doesn't even smell that bad.

Nobody'll mess with him, anyways. Nobody ever does. 

His backpack is stowed away in the locker room, shoved into his little compartment so that the zipper is poking out of the door; he doesn't know how he'd even managed to close it. Spinning the lock as quickly as he can, he opens it up- takes a bit of effort to get the door unstuck, just like always- and pulls everything out, jerking it a bit to get it through the too-small door.

The screen on his flip phone is broken. He doesn't know how he managed to do that, either. Can't even remember cracking it. Nevertheless, there's a spiderweb of cracks running across it from the bottom left corner. Peter can barely make out the time written across the top corner- he needs glasses, definitely, but since he lost his first pair back in fourth grade, he just hasn't gotten back around to replacing them. Probably couldn't afford it, anyways, even with the combination of May's hospital salary and his gas station salary.

The numbers are blurry. Peter squints, trying to focus in, and instantly regrets it.

_"Fuck!"_

He slams his fist against the wall of lockers so hard that they, in turn, hit the wall. It's _seven fifteen-_ fucking _seven fifteen-_ he's _forty-five minutes late_.

That's a detention.

 _"Fucking_ shit," Peter fumes, racing out of the building at a breakneck speed that nearly sends him hurtling into the glass door on the way out. The streets are beginning to wake up- Rose Hill's life starts early for both students and adults because nearly everyone works afternoons- with cars rumbling down the streets, lifted trucks bumbling over potholes, storekeepers opening up their doors.

Peter just slings his bag over his shoulder and _runs._

It's never a good idea for him to do anything too strenuous, but he figures he's already passed that threshold today- after all, his inhaler's in the pocket of his backpack and he knows what an asthma attack feels like. Nobody should ever have expected him to be careful, not with the kind of stamina and endurance strength he has.

May knows he's not careful; has known since he was nine or ten years old.

Ben hadn't been careful, either. She always tells him that he inherited that trait from his uncle, and that she sees her husband in him, but Peter knows that, were Ben still here, he'd try his hardest to rid Peter of it.

Rose Hill's one and only high school isn't far at all from the studio, but Peter's still out of breath by the time he blows through the front gates, slows to a jog through the courtyard, and opens the door as quietly as he possibly can to avoid being noticed. If he can just sneak past the front office by the time his second class is starting, he'll be able to blend into the crowd of students just like he always does, and nobody else will know the better.

Peter's never been a noticeable face in the crowd. He's not anywhere above average height- at five foot seven, he's really below it by an inch or two. He's strong, but not noticeably, and he's quiet and unassuming enough to get wherever he wants to be without being singled out.

People leave him alone, anyways. After the first fight he'd gotten into (seventh grade, behind the middle school- he'd beaten the living shit out of one of the football players) they had all seemed to understand that he was happy by himself and wouldn't encroach on anyone's territory without being provoked.

He was provoked pretty easily, though. Like a powder keg and a lit match.

The hallways are obviously empty with the exception of a few stragglers. Peter flattens himself against his locker, waits for the doors to open from homeroom and first period- and there it is, that ever-moving flood of students rolling out of rooms, laughing, shoving each other into their lockers. 

He doesn't like this part of the day.

It's far too loud.

Pressed up against the wall, Peter keeps his head down as a pair of rowdy boys shove past him, jostling him so that his head hits the lockers with a _bang._ He winces, reaches up to rub the sore spot, and slips into the crowd as smoothly as he can. An elbow catches his side. Someone stomps on his foot. The box of Marlboros in the pocket of his bag bounces and settles and bounces again, and the lighter in his pocket calls to him.

 _Maybe,_ he thinks, _if school hallways were just a little bit wider, he wouldn't want to fucking slug someone every time a class ended._

\- ☁ -

Harley sees one of the sharks the minute he steps out of Composition One, books tucked beneath his elbow, E.J. following close to his heels like the absolute watchdog he is. He elbows him as subtly as he can, jerking his head in the direction of the boy hanging onto the fringe of the crowd.

Peter Parker.

According to Macy, there had been a month or so when Harley'd been younger where he and Parker had been thick as thieves- before his uncle had died- but if a time like that exists, Harley doesn't remember it. And he's definitely tried, racking his mind for any semblance of curly brown hair and dark eyes in his memory.

He's found nothing.

(Macy says he was different when they were younger. Harley thinks she's lying.)

"Looks like he made someone angry," E.J. whispers, gesturing toward the purplish-blue bruise on the line of Parker's jaw. Harley's mouth twitches downwards; the mark is swollen and, if the scab in its center is anything to go off of, was probably the result of something sharp. It's the size of a small orange, spreading across his face like a nebula of cool colors, and reminds him of a time where he was coming to school with marks like that on his forehead and arms.

Harley just shrugs and pushes into the crowd. He keeps his eyes fixed on the back of Parker's head, taking in the limp strands of hair plastered to his neck and the small stud in his left earlobe. Even from the back, he can tell that he's breathing heavily, ribs stuttering as they expand and contract. He's spazzing out. Probably barely breathing.

Because of the size of Rose Hill, most of the kids have known each other since birth. Harley's been a friend of E.J.'s since they were nine, and he's seen the others grow since he was practically a baby.

Parker is the exception.

He's always been there- Harley knows that, has consistently caught glimpses of him since elementary school- but, unlike the way the others have bonded and grown and established friendships, the brown-haired boy hasn't ever tried to interact with any of them outside of school. He lurks in dark corners, the edges of loud hallways, the backs of rooms. Harley'll go hours without even noticing him and then end up in the bathroom and find him backed into a corner with a cigarette in his mouth and a blissfully happy look on his face.

Parker doesn't look happy very often- at least, not that Harley's seen.

He's pretty sure he's addicted to nicotine or something.

That's probably not healthy. Bad for his lungs, too. Harley knows from gym classes that Parker has asthma attacks; despite the fact that he's pretty athletic, Harley's been privy to many a gasping fit.

People tend to laugh at him when he can't find his inhaler. Some of the football players seem to get off on stealing it before classes and seeing what happens.

No wonder he's so angry all the time.

_(Harley can say with confidence that he has never once laughed at Parker when his lungs were struggling to pull in oxygen.)_

_(He can also say, with a bit less confidence, that he has never once helped him off of the ground or told the other boys to stop taking his things.)_

The rumors that spread around the school aren't kind, but, then again, rumors rarely are. Harley knows that some of them are true- Peter gets into fights behind schools and in alleys, pretty much wherever he can. He'd been there for the first one, back in seventh grade (he thinks) where he'd broken Jordan Ellis' nose and had, in turn, received a black eye. He gets the shit beat out of him, beats the shit out of other people, and the cycle continues.

It feels like he comes back to school every week with a new injury.

Harley doesn't know him very well, but he knows it's worrisome. 

Parker's going to get himself hurt badly one of these days, and nobody's going to be there to pick him up.

( _Harley wonders if anyone picks him up now. He doesn't think so.)_

But that's kind of just the way it is in Rose Hill, really. The kids take care of themselves, the adults go to work and come home and beat the shit out of the people they're supporting.

That's just the way it is.

The rest of the day feels like Harley thinks clouds do, all fuzzy and not quite there. He skates through it, taking tests and turning in papers and messing around with E.J. and Clay and his other teammates. It's like he's walking through a dream, conscious of what he's doing but not in control.

This happens sometimes; that feeling of _not there_ is a consistently-recurring emotion that Harley isn't quite sure how he feels about and doesn't really love.

It's there, though.

And he has to deal.

School ends between one and two, and Harley leaves as quickly as he possibly can, throwing his backpack over his shoulder and waving good-bye to the boys. They're probably going to hang out behind some sketchy building somewhere and smoke weed or something (Harley's never touched that shit, and he doesn't plan to).

He doesn't know why they feel like they need to hide it; the only reason that comes to mind is a potential loss of scholarships that could get them out of this hellhole of a town.

At least Parker has the decency to not care.

Then again, he doesn't seem to care about very much. 

The sun above blazes down onto Harley's shoulders, penetrating the thick flannel fabric of his shirt in a way that makes him feel like he's burning. He winces, adjusting it so that it's open on the front, and wipes a hand across his brow. The straps of his heavy bag cut into his skin. He's sure there'll be red marks there later.

Normally, he wouldn't be walking home; his old beater of a truck is in the shop because something is very wrong with the brakes and _apparently_ , Macy doesn't trust him enough to let him fix it himself. He's burned hundreds of dollars on keeping that hunk of twisted, dented metal running, so much that he might as well just buy a new one.

He's pretty attached to it, though.

Macy works at a bakery in the middle of town - one of two in Rose Hill, and by all technicality, she's owned it since Harley was around ten or eleven. She's constantly busy there, stays later than he can keep himself awake and gets up before he leaves for school. He always drives Abby to the elementary school because she's far too young to walk by herself (one of her friends drops her by the bakery after school because Harley can't always make it by the time she gets out).

He's helped out here since he was legal to work, probably a bit before to be honest. Nothing too hard- sometimes he'll be behind the register, sometimes he helps make the cakes (he's not allowed to decorate because he can't do art for shit), and whenever there's a shipment of ingredients, Harley's the only one who can move them.

The storefront doesn't look like much, but then again, none of the town really looks like much. Just a wall of glass windows showing the goods, anything from muffins to fully-iced cakes that look like they were made by a professional artist.

Macy had always wanted to paint.

Harley feels sick every time he thinks of the potential she wasted on raising him.

Macy's behind the counter when he walks in, organizing coins in the register. He dumps his backpack at an empty table (all of them are empty) and leans across the stick-on tile to press a kiss to her cheek, leaning down a bit so the counter's edge digs into his hips. Harley had overtaken her height-wise at age fourteen and had continued to shoot up like a beansprout.

"Hi, hon," she says, distractedly counting bills out of the small tip jar Abby had painted flowers onto. "School go a'right?"

"Yeah, momma, all good."

"Keepin' your grades up?"

_Kind of._

"Yep. All A's."

_Borderline B's. He's fallen behind a bit in Chemistry; it just doesn't make sense to him. Harley's always been smart. A hard worker. He doesn't understand._

The smile on Macy's face is too hard to take away, so Harley doesn't- just slips behind the counter and starts to sort the new goods from the older ones, tossing the latter into a paper bag to bring home. "Work been good today?"

Her shoulders slump, so little that he nearly misses it.

"Oh," he whispers, suddenly painfully aware of the fact that all of the chairs are where they were the night before and the windows and display cases are all full.

Macy shrugs. Counts another bill from the tip jar.

"S'alright," she says, but from the low tone of her voice, he can tell that it's not.

He doesn't argue, though.

"Okay."

They work in silence for what feels like hours, even though it's probably only thirty minutes or so. Harley sweeps under the spotless tables, under the counter, even the sidewalk outside to make sure they look presentable. He cleans the windows and the glass on the display cases, cycles through another batch of muffins, hauls a bag of flour out of storage when he notices that the kitchen's running low. He wipes down the counters. Polishes the oven racks. Runs a load of laundry over to the laundromat, noticing how a large bank of clouds is moving in from the west.

They're dark, those clouds- cumulonimbus, he thinks, or maybe cumulostratus. Signals of a thunderstorm rolling into town. As he watches, on his way back to the bakery with an empty laundry hamper, eyes fixed on the sky, a bolt of white-hot lightning strikes down in a copse of far-away pine trees.

When Harley gets back, rushing ahead of the threatening storm, Macy's watching from the doorway to make sure he gets in. She always waits for him when she can, whether he’s getting home late because of practice or jogging across the road. The blue gingham of her apron looks darker than it is beneath the storm clouds, more of a lilac color than the pale cornflower blue it actually is.

Macy looks good in blue; it brings out her eyes.

It brings out how fucking tired they are, how big the bags beneath them have come, how her smile lines are deep cut into her skin.

Shes beautiful.

She’s so fucking beautiful, and she deserves so much better than a son who could barely keep his grades floating and a deadbeat, absent husband who hadn’t even had the guts to sign divorce papers.

No matter what, Harley thinks, he won’t ever sneak off in the middle of the night.

He won’t ever take the coward’s way out.

Macy opens the door for him, ushering him into the bakery as she shields her eyes with her hand. From the way she’s squinting at the gathering storm, Harley can tell that she’s worried- they don’t have a car, and if Abby gets here and it’s raining, there’s no way they’ll be able to get home. The Keener house is miles out of town, and the roads that lead out to their little lane of houses is riddled with mud and potholes.

The drainage ditches are shit out here, and Harley knows he’s not going to slosh through four inches of dirty water in his school clothes. Especially when he inevitably has to carry Abby on his back because she won’t get her jeans wet.

“Boutta come down ‘n sheets,” Macy says sagely, tapping the window a few times with her fingernail. The chipped polish lining it is the color of fresh plums, and while it doesn’t match anything she’s wearing, Harley thinks it suits her.

”Yeah,” he says with a nod, “prob’ly.”

They watch the clouds from the store window for a moment, side by side, Harley’s hand on the crook of Macy’s elbow. They seem to be picking up pace, billowing over lines of jagged rock (a shootoff of the Smoky mountains) and rows upon rows of tall, craggy pines. As they approach, they seem to darken, turning from lavendar to deep blue to what looks like a bruise left by a giant.

After a few moments, Macy sighs and steps away, wiping her hands on the front of her apron. “Do some schoolwork, baby,” she murmurs before disappearing into the kitchen.

Harley watches the door swing closed with a quiet thud. He lingers a moment more, fingers clutching the thick cuff of his shirtsleeve. His hair is tangled and long- far too long, really, he could probably put it up in a ponytail if he wanted. The ends brush up against his shoulders just enough to be frustrating.

Little things like that seem to set him off for some reasons- quiet sounds, little touches, subtle things that don’t really bother anyone else.

As he pulls his backpack out from under the table, Harley runs a hand through his hair, brushing it back over his shoulders so it rests against his back. He’s able to focus in for just long enough to finish his math homework, gravitating back and forth between his paper and calculator.

Somewhere between the second and third sheets, a light drizzle begins to flutter down from the clouds. Macy gives the rain an approving nod before going back to sorting croissants. Harley sharpens his pencil with his pocket knife and goes back to work.

Slowly, steadily, the rain starts to come down more heavily. Harley knows it can’t be later than four in the afternoon, but outside, it’s as dark as evening. Water pounds against the roof like the steady beats of a drum from one of those bluegrass bands Macy likes so much.

He could probably fall asleep right now, right here at the table, if he wanted to. He’s been up since five, and his eyelids are heavy. Harley’s body is practically begging for sleep, and, for a moment, he nearly gives it what it wants.

And then the little bell hung above the door to tell them when customers are here gives a little ring, and any sense of exhaustion vanishes from Harley’s bones. He feels the chill of the wind blowing in the streets, and beneath that, the smell of ozone and wet grass. The potholes in the roads are probably full of water by now.

There'll be no leaving.

But, apparently, _somebody_ hasn't taken heed to the fact that there's a damn tempest blowing in.

Harley turns around in his seat, already opening his mouth to tell this unexpected, _frankly_ unwelcome visitor that they're closed (even though they're not), and immediately snaps it shut so hard that his teeth rattle in his head.

Parker's hair is plastered to his forehead in flat waves, dripping water down over his eyelids and nose and lips. His eyes are half-lidded and tired, the hazy brown of muddy water, and from the way he's leaning up against the doorway with his chest heaving, he's been running from the incoming storm. Rainwater running in streams down his face mixes with red on his lips to make pink. Harley does a double-take, absorbing the swollen corner of his lip, the cut splitting it down the side, the watery blood running down his chin in rivulets.

"Oh my _fucking_ God," he breathes, pushing his chair away from the table with a loud screech.

Parker doesn't move, still seemingly trying to catch his breath, but his eyes travel up from Harley's tennis shoes to his levis to his shirt and, finally, to his own eyes. He looks _tired_ \- he always looks tired, but this time, it seems a bit different than usual. Less of a physical exhaustion and more of an emotional one.

They stand still, Harley with his hand on the hilt of the pocketknife tucked below his waistband, Parker with his own braced against the doorframe. The blood runs sluggishly down his chin. Absently, his tongue darts out to swipe some of it away, lingering on his lip before disappearing back into his mouth. 

Harley's stomach jumps.

Somewhere in the kitchen, Macy drops a dish, breaking the silence. Parker blinks, puffing out another harsh breath.

"Are you a'right?" Harley asks, fingers still tentatively resting on his knife.

All he gets in return is a harsh, gruff laugh and a shrug. Parker pulls his inhaler out of his pocket- why hadn't he done that before?- and gives it a quick puff with the efficiency of a professional smoker (which, Harley guesses, he kind of is).

The door to the kitchen swings open, breaking the spell as Macy bustles in and sets to work on herding marker toward one of the tables. Harley freezes as the other boy's smile transfers into something warm, something _gentle_ and childish and _whole_ , and as Parker starts up a conversation with his mother about business and school and all sorts of things that Harley can barely process, something in the back of his mind tugs at the strings of his heart.

A blue Thomas the Train shirt burns against the gravel of a driveway, soaked in harsh chemicals and stained with the same blood that decorates Parker's chin.

Harley sits down heavily, watching as Macy dabs the blood away, and draws a deep, cold breath into his lungs.

There's a ghost in the chair across from him. He wonders if, were he to touch it, he would feel anything other than mist.


End file.
